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Overview
A brilliant, illuminating reassessment of the life and work of Jane Austen that makes clear how Austen has been misread for the past two centuries and that shows us how she intended her books to be read, revealing, as well, how subversive and daring--how truly radical--a writer she was.
In this fascinating, revelatory work, Helena Kelly--dazzling Jane Austen authority--looks past the grand houses, the pretty young women, past the demure drawing room dramas and witty commentary on the narrow social worlds of her time that became the hallmark of Austen's work to bring to light the serious, ambitious, deeply subversive nature of this beloved writer. Kelly illuminates the radical subjects--slavery, poverty, feminism, the Church, evolution, among them--considered treasonous at the time, that Austen deftly explored in the six novels that have come to embody an age. The author reveals just how in the novels we find the real Jane Austen: a clever, clear-sighted woman "of information," fully aware of what was going on in the world and sure about what she thought of it. We see a writer who understood that the novel--until then seen as mindless "trash"--could be a great art form and who, perhaps more than any other writer up to that time, imbued it with its particular greatness.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781524732103 |
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Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 05/02/2017 |
Pages: | 336 |
Sales rank: | 628,380 |
Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Everyone—almost everyone—loves Pride and Prejudice.* It regularly tops lists of the hundred most important or best-loved novels. The hero and heroine, Darcy and Elizabeth, have developed lives of their own, rather like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. They’ve become cul- tural icons in their own right, their relationship the ultimate in literary romance.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Jane Austen, the Secret Radical"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Helena Kelly.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 The Authoress 3
Chapter 2 "The Anxieties of Common Life"
Northanger Abbey 35
Chapter 3 The Age of Brass
Sense and Sensibility 69
Chapter 4 "All Our Old Prejudices"
Pride and Prejudice 109
Chapter 5 "The Chain and the Cross"
Mansfield Park 155
Chapter 6 Gruel
Emma 197
Chapter 7 Decline and Fall
Persuasion 237
Chapter 8 The End 275
Acknowledgments 295
Notes 297
Further Reading 301
Index 303